ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates 'child figures' – notions, constructs, representations, discourses, memories – in three intersecting thematic fields: imagination, knowledge and memory. It examines the figure of the 'naughty child', a classic character in the history of Western children's fiction (e.g. Collodi's Pinocchio (1881)), with its underlying pedagogical ideologies. The book investigates children's fiction in the Soviet Union, where strict normative limits regulated how children could be depicted in literature. It elaborates the dialogue between fiction and the child sciences in the works of Finnish realist writers at the turn of the twentieth century, who particularly addressed the mind of the child. The book focuses on the creation and conceptualisation of a 'new' fragile subject; children with severe liver disease who, through pioneering surgery, could be saved from a certain early death.
